


lay all your love on me

by jessequicksters



Series: golden ages [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anniversary, Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Bittersweet, Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, Fix-It of Sorts, M/M, Multiverse, POV Steve Rogers, Post-Apocalypse, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Retirement
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-07
Updated: 2019-05-07
Packaged: 2020-02-27 11:48:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18738400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jessequicksters/pseuds/jessequicksters
Summary: In a universe where they managed to avert the events of Avengers: Endgame, Steve and Tony move on and make a life for themselves. It's too easy, sometimes, to forget what they could've lost.(In which they live on a farm years after the end of the world.)





	lay all your love on me

**Author's Note:**

> a follow up to 'a finite resource' but works as a post-endgame standalone (multiverse stevetony, major canon divergence)

Steve is kissing Tony slowly and methodically, the other man pressed up against a tree. Everything’s a little damp in the autumn morning; it’s humid and little bit foggy in the air after the rain last night. Steve presses his weight onto Tony, hearing a crack in the bark behind him. He slides his hands under Tony’s plaid shirt and strokes his torso, brushing against the hairs of his stomach, dragging his thumbs down lower until he reaches the rough patch of coarser hair down his pelvis, still a little sticky from the messy morning they had.

“Fuck, Steve. We’re never going to end up on the cover Country Living if we can’t even extract sap without—oh, dear _god_.”

Tony drops the tap in his hand and it lands on the leafy ground with a thud and a rustle.

Steve has his hand reaching in Tony’s boxers now, and it’s getting a little difficult to get a good grip on it without zipping open his jeans entirely. He tries to do it as smoothly as he can, while burying his face in Tony’s neck and planting hot kisses on him, breath fogging up in the cold morning air.

“What’s with you this morning, cowboy? I mean, I know you’re constantly looking to double-tap this ass every time we finish a round, but we’ve finished like… six rounds, since last night.” Tony just surrenders under his touch. Steve sees the relaxed look on his face, smiling as he leans back and closes his eyes. 

“Are you complaining now?”

Tony shrugs. “Complaining? Me? With this kind of treatment? Nope, never. Just a partial observation, that’s all. Are your hormones going off again? You know we still don’t know the side effects of your serum going into old age. I’m telling you, you could turn into the Hulk when you get older and I’m going to need to build a bigger farm.” 

Steve pauses what he’s doing to throw an incredulous look at Tony. He knows he hasn’t forgotten, that he’s just pretending, but Tony’s never been one to celebrate, not earnestly at least. For a man who likes to put on a good show, Tony can still be terrified of intimacy behind the curtains. 

“If you must know, it’s the anniversary of the day you came back to Earth. It’s also, coincidentally, the day we figured to take this seriously between us.”

“Is that today?” He cocks his head to the side and gives Steve a thin smile.

“It is, so apologies if I would like to show my gratitude towards you today,” Steve replies. He drops down to the ground and Tony beams, flushing in places people would kill to know about. It makes Steve proud, just a little.

“Apology accepted.”

 

-

 

“Hey, Pep. Yeah, Saturday sounds good to me. Are we really—she’s into baseball now? In that case, I’ll put Steve on the roster for the weekend. Just kidding! Of course I’ll come. Send Morgoona our love. Hotdogs and candy, what do you mean that’s not lunch?”

Steve chuckles as he pushes the steaming plate of lasagna in front of Tony, pointing at it with a spatula to signal that it’s time for dinner. He cuts his own section from the ceramic dish and sits in front of him at the dinner table, pouring some red wine into their glasses as the fireplace crackles as one of Tony’s bluesy rock and roll records play in the background.

“You done?” Steve mouths.

“Yeah, I am. Bye, Pep. Love you, tell May we wish she’d come over more, we’ve gotten rid of the termites, I swear.”

He hangs up and picks up the glass of wine, promptly trying to extend a toast to Steve.

“Baseball game, huh?” Steve grins, as their glasses clink. “I knew she’d love it, I told you she was a natural!”

They tuck into their food as the sound of knives on plates start to distract them from the sound of cicadas outside. Steve never thought he’d ever be a father—the dream of domesticity had long been something out of his grasp, even back in the days before the war, it was never something he thought of. It wasn’t until he met Tony that he really started asking himself what he wanted out of life and the answer was simple enough: someone to make life worth living, not just worth dying for.

And Tony Stark, hell, there’s so much about him that makes Steve wish they could both live forever. He oozes with life, the yearning of wanting more of it in everything around him—the minute Pepper and May announced that they were looking for a donor for their child, Tony didn’t even hesitate, and neither did Steve when he asked. Morgan is a treasure with the bright-eyed curiosity of a Stark and the strength of his two mothers, Steve can only be grateful to be able to be a part of this family.

For two people who have come far too close to death more times than most people can count, they know the value of cherishing what they have all too well.

“You thinking about something?” Tony asks, stuffing the last piece of lasagna on his plate into his mouth. Steve hadn’t even noticed he’d eaten that fast. Tony helps himself to more while waiting on a response.

“Not much, just—about how much things have changed.” 

Tony lets out a sharp chuckle. “You can say that.”

“I never thought it would be easy—not that it has been easy, for any of us,” Steve says, and the room turns a somber, as it does frequently in moments when they remember that the world out there is only half as big as it used to be.

“I never thought I could move on, like this, settle down, start a new life. I thought I still had to be the person I was back in the 40’s, because that’s who they saw me as when I came out of the ice. It was mission after mission, disaster after disaster and it really wasn’t until we started—well, we became closer, that I finally confronted this idea of myself I’ve been concealing.”

Tony looks at him, brown eyes warm under the dimmed lighting in the room. His caring gaze is soft, nonetheless.

“I’ve always known you were in there, Steve. You were a tough shell to crack, I give you that, but so was I. Letting you in was the best decision of my life, even when we had to fight our way through it.”

Steve tips his head back and rolls his eyes. “Don’t remind me. I feel awful about what we did to each other back then.”

“And yet you’d be the last person to say you regretted some of the choices you made,” Tony smirks.

“Only before you.”

“Make no mistake, we’re still the same people, just under different circumstances. Helps that we’ve been given a second chance at this life, too, for all that’s happened.”

Steve thinks back to the remembrance event from last month. Everyone—well, everyone who was left was there. It’s still hard, even after nine years, thinking about those they lost. But something that Steve said to Tony a lifetime ago still rings in his head: there will always be people who will step up. Heroes rise, generations grow older and by the time Steve and Tony made the executive decision to retire, they were confident enough that they’ve left the world in capable hands.

Of course, retirement in their line of work comes with a bold asterisk; an expectation that someday, anything could turn their world upside down in the blink of an eye. But until then, Steve’s enjoying gazing at Tony Stark, a man whose mind works at the speed of light, slowing down to take a sip of their homemade wine from their vineyard, which took them months to grow and produce. They’ve been building slow and they’ve been building simple, but most importantly they’ve been building something between them that can and will last.

“What are you staring at, Mr. Rogers?” Tony sets his empty glass down and tantalizingly licks his wine-stained lips, before dabbing it with a napkin.

“I love you, Tony.” Steve reaches for his hand on the table.

“I love you too, unequivocally,” Tony replies without missing a beat. 

  

-

 

It’s not that Steve doesn’t have nightmares and a guilty conscience, because he does and he always will. When Tony first returned from space, an inch away from death, Steve and the rest of the team were working on a way to undo what Thanos did. They killed him, but not before discovering that in one universe, they managed to bring everyone back.

Tony doesn’t make it out alive in that universe.

He tells Tony, of course—no more secrets—and Tony’s initial reaction was to sacrifice himself, but Steve told him that they don’t trade lives and Tony disagreed but they waited to make a decision. And they waited, and waited.

Tony moved out of Manhattan. Steve followed. They fought some more local battles. Steve nearly died. A Skrull invasion happened, and more and more people who they thought they could trust ended up betraying them. They only knew each other. Steve could come home and Tony would tell him that he’s done his best, that he’s enough for him. And so the longer the waited, the more entangled they became until they were the sun in each other’s worlds and it became unthinkable to imagine life without the other.

As the years went by, they saw others moving on, too. It became harder for people to look back; their aches dulled as they settled into their new reality. New lives blossomed, new dreams and the new normal became, well, normal.

Steve met a wanderer one day, which was perhaps one of the strangest occurrences in his life because the wanderer was himself. (A version of himself from that very timeline where they won.)

Steve asked him if it was worth it.

He said it wasn’t.

Steve remembers that day and thinks about it every night when he’s holding Tony in bed, asleep and warm under the sheets, this fragile man who could (and did, elsewhere) defeat the most powerful being in the universe. He wakes up every morning grateful that he still has so much more life to live with him, so much more time to grow old together and to learn new ways to love one another. He tries not to think about what could've been, only what is.

Until the next apocalypse arrives, they’re staying in bed for the rest of the morning and the foreseeable future.

 


End file.
